Please forgive me and understand if I suggest something that you yourself did not say. I am going for an omnibus post, and I can't hit all targets with one bullet. Work with me, okay? I don't mean you have to agree. If I meant that I would just dictate. I DO mean, try to look at it another way, even if after doing so you still think it's nuts.
The basic problem is the problem of radical monotheism. What do I mean? (If you find out, please tell me.)
Let us postulate ONE God, who created everything that is.
If we do so, we cannot reasonably say that God is, for example, sometimes good and sometimes evil. To do so would be to postulate some standard independent of God, by which He can be judged. And that makes Him not one supreme God, but rather subject to a standard more exalted than He.
Consequently, (remember, you're working with me) there is no good thing, no capital 'G' "Good", that does not have it's origin in Him.
Now let's look at the Fall Story AND the Creation of Man story. Man is made "a living soul" when God's breath (or wind, or spirit) is breathed into a body. It is the union of animating breath and flesh that makes a human. Importantly, without the Divine "flatus" (one of my favorite terms) all that's there is a body which will tend to fall apart.
IF man rejects God, and if God somehow can be described as "honoring" Man's choice, then Man is rejecting what keeps him not just "alive" but "together."
And the story would seem to confirm that. Adam blames Eve; Eve blames the serpent -- they INSTANTLY disavow personal integrity -- which is just another word for being "together with yourself." And ultimately they die, and fall apart.
I get the impression that for some whom I am addressing, it seems that God made an arbitrary rule and severely punished breaking that rule. Against that I am suggesting that, whatever the intrinsic properties of the fruit of the tree, God had given Man an opportunity both to intend and to act to maintain a positive allegiance to God. Man rejected God.
IF God is to honor man's choice, then it is not a punishment pulled out of some cosmic sack o' punishment that God inflicts. It is nothing more than the reality of what man chose.
A limited analogy would be that if you choose to drink poison, God does not arbitrarily inflict a painful death on you. He honors your choice, and your choice was to do something which leads to a painful death.
Consider for a moment the alternative: If God were NOT to honor your choice, then when you gave way to rage and shot someone, God would turn aside the bullet. It's nice because the person you shot at is not hurt or killed.
But there is nothing like freedom there. You simply cannot, in this case, make an effectual choice against God.
So, what it means to affirm one and only one God who is the origin of all good, is to affirm that without God there is no good.
So the Devil, Satan, our ancient Adversary, is not, cannot be, the simple opposite to God. The Devil is a created entity. His opposite, for us Christians, is not God, but the archangel Michael.
This point is probably uniquely Catholic (and maybe Orthodox). Ideas, we think, are real. And because God thinks them, they are eternal. Consequently (skipping several steps) the "faculty" which perceives and deals with ideas (like triangularity or justice) is eternal. Otherwise it would not appreciate ideas. (I know this is not a popular view, but I think it is one of the few coherent views.)
So angels and 'rational animals' (humans, and maybe ETs, who knows?) are created with an eternal aspect. Angels have no body to fall apart, so they are entirely eternal. Fallen angels are the Devil and the demons. They exercised their will at the instant of their creation. Some chose God, some chose enmity with God.
The entire "future history" of angels, demons, and humans is the "coming true" of their choices.
Consider: if you are a notorious liar, God is not arbitrarily punishing you if you are not believed and if you yourself get confused about the truth. That is what you chose.
The paradigmatic overeating glutton chooses less and less satisfaction with more and more heartburn and other pains. He requires more and more exotic and extreme gustatory experiences to gratify him. What is the natural playing out of that choice? What other than a perpetually unsatisfied appetite plagued by pain?
Many of the Christians on this thread know I am devoted to Dante. That is because the punishments he envisions in hell are not arbitrary tortures inflicted on the disobedient. It's not even a matter or "the punishment fits the crime." In Dante's Inferno, the punishment is nothing other than the crime itself, revealed in all its horror.
So, finally, the idea of God as a punitive and jealous husband only goes so far. We can envision the wife having a happy life without the husband. But we cannot envision happiness without happiness. And, to us at least, God is happiness and the only source of enduring happiness.
Let me start at the beginning: I am pretty sure there was a creator in the beginning, anything after that is speculation. The universe cannot mathematically exist and is far too complicated to be a random chance creation without some outside force acting upon it. It seems fairly obvious if you do basic homework that all this was made, by someone or something.
Anything after that statement is conjecture, that’s faith. Anything the major religions say after that is just their word against yours with no evidence leaning one way or another. I zero in on Christianity, because that is my upbringing, I can’t speak for anything else.
Basically what you and the author of this article are asking me to do is accept blackmail. Basically, clean his room to his near impossible to meet standards or he is going to let someone else blow my brains out, not out of anger, but because I chose not to clean his room and that is the consequences of not picking up his socks. What benefit is it for me to perform such meaningless chores, just for the sake a promise to be allowed to clean his room, cook his meals, worship him just the way he likes for all eternity? A promise backed up by no facts whatsoever, just the word of people dead thousands of years?
Who in their right mind would be happy being not even a wife, more like a maid, hired help? We get room and board and we’re supposed to be grateful for this because the alternative is a painful death at the hands of the vicious biker gang waiting outside? It’s not that much of a choice you and your ilk seem to be offering here. Eternal slavery or horrific death. Some people are happy just scrubbing floors and toilets, but most would not be satisfied with mindless servitude to a seemingly absent landlord that does nothing to maintain the property, but nonetheless demands full rent paid on time or face eviction. meanwhile the plumbing is backed up, the wiring is shoddy and the heat does not function properly with the promise that someday, after your dead you can live in a perfect house, where you can cook and clean for him in a mansion instead of a shack.
I do not believe in the notion of a god that knows me intimately, and wants me to be happy, because I see not a shred of evidence, in fact I see more and more quite the opposite; and I reject the idea that any god that were such a being would lay down a “worship me or die” ultimatum on anyone. It strikes me as insecure at the least, very non divine of a supreme being. Calling that free will is like demanding I choose a bullet or jumping off a building and calling that free will. It’s preposterous on it’s face because neither choice in my opinion is acceptable.
It strikes me like the behavior of a bully, I do not respond to threats from bullies, even wrapped in good intentions and white cloth.
I go to church looking for god, he aint there I feel nothing tug on my heart or move me in any meaningful way. I keep giving him a message to call me at my home. He has yet to return my calls. I am thinking about 2 or 3 thousand years of people doing the same thing with no results, that perhaps one could conclude that the number has been disconnected, or moved without leaving a forwarding address. But, we’re continually told, with a straight face that god is there and listening and is the only thing that keeps the devil at bey, and if we do not buy into this completely, we die a horrific death; without any proof whatsoever. After a few hundred generations, credibility wears thin.
I don’t need much in a god, but showing up on CNN every few hundred years or so telling us to turn down the stereo would be nice. Sending your little sister do it for him has no credibility with me. She could well be making the whole thing up for her own gain. Why should I take her word for it?